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I’m thrilled to announce that Twitter and IBM are partnering to transform how businesses and institutions understand their customers, markets and trends – and inform every business decision. For details, see our post on the Twitter blog and IBM’s press release.

At Gnip, we’re always excited to hear about groups and individuals who are using social data in unique ways to improve our world. We were recently fortunate enough to support this use of social data for humanitarian good first-hand. Along with Plugged In to Gnip partner, Qlik, and international relief organization, Medair, we hosted a hackathon focused on global disaster response.

The hackathon took place during Qlik’s annual partner conference in Orlando and studied social content from last year’s Typhoon Haiyan. Historical Twitter data from Gnip was paired with financial information from Medair to give participants the opportunity to create new analytic tools on Qlik’s QlikView.Next BI platform. The Twitter data set specifically included Tweets from users in the Philippines for the two week period around Typhoon Haiyan in November of 2013. The unique combination of data and platform allowed the hackathon developers to dissect and visualize a massive social data set with the goal of uncovering new insights that could be applied in future natural disasters.

For example, one team used Gnip’s Profile Geo Enrichment to map Tweets from highly-specific areas according to keywords such as “water”, “food” or “shelter”. Identifying trends in which geographic areas have greater needs for certain types of aid could provide a model for improving disaster response times and efficiencies. Another team analyzed spikes in the use of certain hashtags as a way to uncover actionable data being shared about the residual impacts of the typhoon. The developers’ efforts were all brought to life through the QlikView.Next visualization platform, making the resulting insight discovery process very intuitive and easy to comprehend. The results were pretty amazing, and here’s a look at the winning app!

“With Gnip’s support, we were extremely honored to be able to work with Medair for this year’s Qlik Hackathon and help them use data to further the impact of the great work they are doing worldwide,” said Peter McQuade, vice president of Corporate Social Responsibility at Qlik. “It provides Medair with an application that supports their fundraising efforts and ultimately helps change our world by maximizing the impact of their work with some of the world’s most vulnerable people.”

We would like to express our sincere thanks to both Medair and Qlik for inviting us to participate in such a meaningful cause. The hackathon produced new social data applications that Medair and first responder teams may be able to use in future disaster response efforts to better help those immediately affected. As for Gnip, we can’t wait to see how social data will be applied toward other humanitarian causes moving forward!

I’m happy to announce a new solution we’ve built to make it simple to get massive amounts of social data into the AWS cloud environment. I’m here in London for the AWS Summit where Stephen E. Schmidt, Vice President of Amazon Web Services, just announced that Gnip’s new Kinesis Connector is available as a free AMI starting today in the AWS Marketplace. This new application takes care of ingesting streaming social data from Gnip into Amazon Kinesis. Spinning up a new instance of the Gnip Kinesis Connector takes about five minutes, and once you’re done, you can focus on writing your own applications that make use of social data instead of spending time writing code to consume it.

Amazon Kinesis is AWS’s managed service for processing streaming data. It has its own client libraries that enable developers to build streaming data processing applications and get data into AWS services like Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon S3 and Amazon Redshift for use in analytics and business intelligence applications. You can read an in-depth description of Amazon Kinesis and its benefits on the AWS blog.

We were excited when Amazon Kinesis launched last November because it helps solve key challenges that we know our customers face. At Gnip, we understand the challenges of streaming massive amounts of data much better than most. Some of the biggest hurdles – especially for high-volume streams – include maintaining a consistent connection, recovering data after a dropped connection, and keeping up with reading from a stream during large spikes of inbound data. The combination of Gnip’s Kinesis Connector and Amazon Kinesis provides a “best practice” solution for social data integration with Gnip’s streaming APIs that helps address all of these hurdles.

Gnip’s Kinesis Connector and the high-availability Amazon AWS environment provide a seamless “out-of-the-box” solution to maintain full fidelity data without worrying about HTTP streaming connections. If and when connections do drop (it’s impossible to maintain an HTTP streaming connection forever), Gnip’s Kinesis Connector automatically reconnects as quickly as possible and uses Gnip’s Backfill feature to ingest data you would have otherwise missed. And due to the durable nature of data in Amazon Kinesis, you can pick right back up where you left off reading from Amazon Kinesis if your consumer application needs to restart.

In addition to these features, one of the biggest benefits of Amazon Kinesis is its low cost. To give you a sense for what that low cost looks like, a Twitter Decahose stream delivers about 50MM messages in a day. Between Amazon Kinesis shard costs and HTTP PUT costs, it would cost about $2.12 per day to put all this data into Amazon Kinesis (plus Amazon EC2 costs for the instance).

Gnip’s Kinesis Connector is ready to use starting today for any Twitter PowerTrack or Decahose stream. We’re excited about the many new, different applications this will make possible for our customers. We hope you’ll take it for a test drive and share feedback with us about how it helps you and your business do more with social data.

While Foursquare has always provided tools for businesses to manage their own presence, the introduction of Foursquare data to Adobe Social creates entirely new opportunities. Large retailers will be able to understand check-in trends over time and compare their performance against the competition. Concert promoters will be able to analyze the impact of specific marketing campaigns. Sports teams will be able to see which games are popular with an engaged social media audience.

We’re thrilled that this data is now available to the broad range of customers who use Adobe Social and can’t wait to see how they use it to derive new insights to drive their businesses.

Kudos to Adobe for moving so quickly to adopt Foursquare into their platform!

With more than 10% of the Twitter firehose in Japanese, the Japanese market for social data is a huge opportunity. This is why Gnip is excited to announce that we’re partnering with Hottolink as part of a strategic alliance to better serve Twitter data in Japan.

Through the alliance, Hottolink will have access to Gnip’s suite of products that serve data from Twitter’s full firehose. This data will power Hottolink’s social media listening platform with ongoing and historical access to Tweets in Japanese and every other language. By partnering with Hottolink, Gnip will have access to Hottolink’s technology and expertise, enabling Gnip to better meet the needs of the Japanese market.

Japan is the third-largest Tweeting population in the world with more than 30 million accounts and has some of the most active users in the world. In fact, the world record for tweets-per-second was set in December 2011 during the television broadcast of the Japanese anime movie “Castle in the Sky,” with 25,088 tweets.

In Japan, they call a Tweet a “mumble” but the signal from Japanese language Tweets is loud and clear. If you’re interested in learning more, please check out the press release (also in Japanese!) or email info@gnip.com.

“This new data from Automattic is a big addition and a testament to Gnip’s commitment to drive the social data economy forward. This is an important source to add to the social data mix, one that we know our customers will take full advantage of.”

- Rob Begg, VP Marketing of Radian6

As social media data becomes more and more important across a range of businesses, our customers are asking for access to more data sources to give them a more complete picture of the social media conversations that are relevant to their businesses.

Today, we’re excited to announce a major addition to our coverage of the conversations taking place on blogs around the world. We’re expanding our relationship with Automattic to make a whole new universe of blog and comment data available to the market for the first time anywhere.

As of today, we are now offering the full firehose of blog posts and comments from Jetpack-powered WordPress.org sites, as well as engagement streams of “likes” from WordPress.com and IntenseDebate. The new data from WordPress.org greatly increases the coverage available to those who are looking to do deep analysis of blog posts and comments. The new engagement streams enable companies to pull in reaction data to quickly understand sentiment, relevance and resonance. With this they can gauge the intensity of opinion around fast moving blog and comment conversations, helping prioritize critical response.

Being full firehoses, all of the streams from Automattic ensure 100% coverage in realtime giving customers the peace of mind that they can keep up the entire discussion on fast moving threads.

The scope of coverage offered by Automattic is pretty incredible. Check out some of these stats:

While the market has been on its roller coaster ride across the past month, Gnip has kept its collective head down and stayed busy on behalf of our Investment Management clients (hedge funds, HFTs, asset managers, etc.). That hard work has paid off and we have two exciting announcements to make today.

Launch of Gnip MarketStream: Our hedge fund clients have been quite vocal in their desire for a package incorporating the most relevant social data streams into a single low-latency, high-volume solution. We’re proud to answer their needs with the launch of Gnip MarketStream, a realtime data solution that packages the incredibly rich and broad “voice of the market” Twitter stream with the uniquely deep and targeted “voice of the trader” StockTwits stream.

Premium Partnership with StockTwits: An integral component of the Gnip MarketStream is StockTwits social media data. We’re thrilled to announce this partnership with StockTwits, the leading realtime financial platform for the investment community and creator of the $(TICKER) tag. The StockTwits stream is a curated, defined-demographic, realtime social data stream focused on investment decisions and analysis. Gnip now provides streaming access to the full StockTwits firehose of social data, and offers access to historical content as far back as 2009.

While the use of social media data by the investment community has included use of this data in news analysis and equity research, the primary adoption of this data across the last six months has been as a trading indicator. By combining the strengths of both the Twitter stream and the StockTwits stream, Gnip MarketStream provides investment professionals unparalleled access to relevant social data at time when social media has become an increasingly vital channel for news and market sentiment.

For more information about Gnip MarketStream or StockTwits data, contact trading@gnip.com.

The Twitter Streaming API is designed to deliver limited volumes of data via two main types of realtime data streams: sampled streams and filtered streams. Many users like to use the Streaming API because the streaming nature of the data delivery means that the data is delivered closer to realtime than it is from the Search API (which I wrote about last week). But the Streaming API wasn’t designed to deliver full coverage results and so has some key limitations for enterprise customers. Let’s review the two types of data streams accessible from the Streaming API.The first type of stream is “sampled streams.” Sampled streams deliver a random sampling of Tweets at a statistically valid percentage of the full 100% Firehose. The free access level to the sampled stream is called the “Spritzer” and Twitter has it currently set to approximately 1% of the full 100% Firehose. (You may have also heard of the “Gardenhose,” or a randomly sampled 10% stream. Twitter used to provide some increased access levels to businesses, but announced last November that they’re not granting increased access to any new companies and gradually transitioning their current Gardenhose-level customers to Spritzer or to commercial agreements with resyndication partners like Gnip.)

The second type of data stream is “filtered streams.” Filtered streams deliver all the Tweets that match a filter you select (eg. keywords, usernames, or geographical boundaries). This can be very useful for developers or businesses that need limited access to specific Tweets.

Because the Streaming API is not designed for enterprise access, however, Twitter imposes some restrictions on its filtered streams that are important to understand. First, the volume of Tweets accessible through these streams is limited so that it will never exceed a certain percentage of the full Firehose. (This percentage is not publicly shared by Twitter.) As a result, only low-volume queries can reliably be accommodated. Second, Twitter imposes a query limit: currently, users can query for a maximum of 400 keywords and only a limited number of usernames. This is a significant challenge for many businesses. Third, Boolean operators are not supported by the Streaming API like they are by the Search API (and by Gnip’s API). And finally, there is no guarantee that Twitter’s access levels will remain unchanged in the future. Enterprises that need guaranteed access to data over time should understand that building a business on any free, public APIs can be risky.

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The Search API and Streaming API are great ways to gather a sampling of social media data from Twitter. We’re clearly fans over here at Gnip; we actually offer Search API access through our Enterprise Data Collector. And here’s one more cool benefit of using Twitter’s free public APIs: those APIs don’t prohibit display of the Tweets you receive to the general public like premium Twitter feeds from Gnip and other resyndication partners do.

But whether you’re using the Search API or the Streaming API, keep in mind that those feeds simply aren’t designed for enterprise access. And as a result, you’re using the same data sets available to anyone with a computer, your coverage is unlikely to be complete, and Twitter reserves the right change the data accessibility or Terms of Use for those APIs at any time.

If your business dictates a need for full coverage data, more complex queries, an agreement that ensures continued access to data over time, or enterprise-level customer support, then we recommend getting in touch with a premium social media data provider like Gnip. Our complementary premium Twitter products include Power Track for data filtered by keyword or other parameters, and Decahose and Halfhose for randomly sampled data streams (10% and 50%, respectively). If you’d like to learn more, we’d love to hear from you at sales@gnip.com or 888.777.7405.

The Twitter Search API can theoretically provide full coverage of ongoing streams of Tweets. That means it can, in theory, deliver 100% of Tweets that match the search terms you specify almost in realtime. But in reality, the Search API is not intended and does not fully support the repeated constant searches that would be required to deliver 100% coverage.Twitter has indicated that the Search API is primarily intended to help end users surface interesting and relevant Tweets that are happening now. Since the Search API is a polling-based API, the rate limits that Twitter has in place impact the ability to get full coverage streams for monitoring and analytics use cases. To get data from the Search API, your system may repeatedly ask Twitter’s servers for the most recent results that match one of your search queries. On each request, Twitter returns a limited number of results to the request (for example “latest 100 Tweets”). If there have been more than 100 Tweets created about a search query since the last time you sent the request, some of the matching Tweets will be lost.

So . . . can you just make requests for results more frequently? Well, yes, you can, but the total number or requests you’re allowed to make per unit time is constrained by Twitter’s rate limits. Some queries are so popular (hello “Justin Bieber”) that it can be impossible to make enough requests to Twitter for that query alone to keep up with this stream. And this is only the beginning of the problem as no monitoring or analytics vendor is interested in just one term; many have hundreds to thousands of brands or products to monitor.

Let’s consider a couple examples to clarify. First, say you want all Tweets mentioning “Coca Cola” and only that one term. There might be fewer than 100 matching Tweets per second usually — but if there’s a spike (say that term becomes a trending topic after a Super Bowl commercial), then there will likely be more than 100 per second. If because of Twitter’s rate limits, you’re only allowed to send one request per second, you will have missed some of the Tweets generated at the most critical moment of all.

Now, let’s be realistic: you’re probably not tracking just one term. Most of our customers are interested in tracking somewhere between dozens and hundreds of thousands of terms. If you add 999 more terms to your list, then you’ll only be checking for Tweets matching “Coca Cola” once every 1,000 seconds. And in 1,000 seconds, there could easily be more than 100 Tweets mentioning your keyword, even on an average day. (Keep in mind that there are over a billion Tweets per week nowadays.) So, in this scenario, you could easily miss Tweets if you’re using the Twitter Search API. It’s also worth bearing in mind that the Tweets you do receive won’t arrive in realtime because you’re only querying for the Tweets every 1,000 seconds.

Because of these issues related to the monitoring use cases, data collection strategies relying exclusively on the Search API will frequently deliver poor coverage of Twitter data. Also, be forewarned, if you are working with a monitoring or analytics vendor who claims full Twitter coverage but is using the Search API exclusively, you’re being misled.

Although coverage is not complete, one great thing about the Twitter Search API is the complex operator capabilities it supports, such as Boolean queries and geo filtering. Although the coverage is limited, some people opt to use the Search API to collect a sampling of Tweets that match their search terms because it supports Boolean operators and geo parameters. Because these filtering features have been so well liked, Gnip has replicated many of them in our own premium Twitter API (made even more powerful by the full coverage and unique data enrichments we offer).

So, to recap, the Twitter Search API offers great operator support but you should know that you’ll generally only see a portion of the total Tweets that match your keywords and your data might arrive with some delay. To simplify access to the Twitter Search API, consider trying out Gnip’s Enterprise Data Collector; our “Keyword Notices” feed retrieves, normalizes, and deduplicates data delivered through the Search API. We can also stream it to you so you don’t have to poll for your results. (“Gnip” reverses the “ping,” get it?)

But the only way to ensure you receive full coverage of Tweets that match your filtering criteria is to work with a premium data provider (like us! blush…) for full coverage Twitter firehose filtering. (See our Power Track feed if you’d like for more info on that.)

You may find yourself wondering . . . “What’s the best way to access the Twitter data I need?” Well the answer depends on the type and amount of data you are trying to access. Given that there are multiple options, we have designed a three part series of blog posts that explain the differences between the coverage the general public can access and the coverage available through Twitter’s resyndication agreement with Gnip. Let’s dive in . ..

Understanding Twitter’s Public APIs . . . You Mean There is More than One?

In fact, there are three Twitter APIs: the REST API, the Streaming API, and the Search API. Within the world of social media monitoring and social media analytics, we need to focus primarily on the latter two.

Search API - The Twitter Search API is a dedicated API for running searches against the index of recent Tweets

Whether you get your Twitter data from the Search API, the Streaming API, or through Gnip, only public statuses are available (and NOT protected Tweets). Additionally, before Tweets are made available to both of these APIs and Gnip, Twitter applies a quality filter to weed out spam.

So now that you have a general understanding of Twitter’s APIs . . . stay tuned for Part 2, where we will take a deeper dive into understanding Twitter’s Search API, coming next week…